When I first began to write seriously a
few years ago – having spent about a decade poking around – I
bought the usual selection of 'how to write a novel' books. (All of
which have long ago been donated to charity shops, but that's another
story.) They all had in common the requirement to come up with a
detailed outline, a plan to follow while writing. I sat down to
start...and couldn't get anywhere. Putting together an outline that
even remotely satisfied me was a difficult enough process to begin
with, but when it came to translating that into an actual book, I
failed. I've got about a half-dozen half-finished manuscripts from
those times knocking about, none of which will ever see the light of
day. (Pretty much anything I liked from them has been cannibalized
for other books in any case.)
Years of frustration before I finally
worked out where I was going wrong. Because I had plotted everything
out before I'd got around to writing, “It was a dark and stormy
night”, the story was finished in my head. I knew how it ended, who
lived and who died, who got the girl and who was left to stew for the
sequel. There wasn't anything satisfying in that. It came to me that
I needed to take the journey I was going to take the reader on myself
first, but that I couldn't script it; I had to live it as the reader
would, one page at a time. I didn't know there was a name for this
until recently: Discovery Writing. And in this way, I've written
three books in three months, where before my output was effectively
nil. So...how do I work?
Well, just because I'm making things up
'on the fly' doesn't mean that I don't need to do some preparation.
I'm blessed with a memory good enough that I can remember the
previous books in the series I'm writing pretty well, but that
doesn't mean a good read-through of the last book isn't necessary.
Usually the core idea of the 'next book' occurs about half-way
through the book I am writing, so I let that percolate around in my
head for a little while. The absolute first step is to make a few
lists – not of story ideas, but of names, places. That's critical
if you aren't going to go mad trying to remember 'who that guy was'.
It's better to go overboard with writing character names at this
point, even though you might not do anything with half of them, it
saves time later in the process.
Then – the cool idea. There's always
something I want to see in each book, usually a series of somethings,
and they give the core framework that I want to hang the plot around.
Take the novel I'm finishing up as I write this, 'Not One Step Back',
- I knew the ending of the book first. The rest had to be created to
get to that point, ticking off a series of story options. With a
series that has an arc, progress needs to be made along that
plotline; the individual arcs of characters need to be pushed as
well, which generally suggests scenes, dialogue, background to be
fitted in. I keep this stuff in my head mostly, but this can also
easily be written down.
Once that little bit of preparation is
done – which for me usually means two weeks' thinking time and a
day actually putting together the lists – I start work on the book.
I find it best to set a deadline, but that's just me; I've started my
last three books on the first day of each month, and that's something
I think I'm going to stick to. The trick then is to write and keep
writing; try and get into the heads of your characters, and let them
guide you where they want to go. You know what the destination is,
but they can tell you how to get there. Now the hardest part of this
whole process is beginning book one; at that point, the characters do
not yet exist. You will be surprised. (I certainly was. The series
was supposed to be from one POV; by the tenth chapter there was
another one I hadn't been expecting.)
Roll with the punches. Characters that
at first conception you liked will turn out to be less interesting to
write; ones that you were not expecting to enjoy will come to the
forefront. An example from the first book, 'Price of Admiralty'; half
the book follows the adventures of a group of Triplanetary Espatiers
(Space Marines, basically – but don't tell Games Workshop's
lawyers) on the surface of a planet, but a lot of that wasn't in my
original conception. I found I enjoyed writing them, and, well – if
you enjoy writing something, it's more likely that it will come
through to the reader enjoying it as well, in my experience. The
character of 'Orlova' went from having a sub-plot to having half the
book to herself, and has continued to push herself forward – she
developed a good double-act with another character who was originally
meant to simply be name-dropped, but as a result has developed into a
major character in her own right. This happens.
The plot will twist itself around, as
well, in unexpected ways. That's part of the fun, but it
This happens. During each of the three
books I've written in this way, I've had to pause at a point because
I've written myself into a corner. Don't try and force it – just
stop and spend the day thinking about what you are doing. By this
time I'm usually well into the book, so I can start working out where
I need to go to get to the end – and this is when I often do put
together a short outline to organise my thoughts, but I've never done
this earlier than half-way through the book. It was at Chapter 18
this time that I stumbled for a day.
The main thing is to finish the book.
Tidy it up later; I always do – but working this way, it is
possible to get from 'I have a neat idea' to 'I have a workable first
draft' an awful lot faster than if you spend weeks or months plotting
out; and that means that the initial enthusiasm for the project
stays, and hopefully makes itself felt in the book.
The last thing I'll say here is that
this isn't for everyone. All those books were given away because they
weren't helping; pushing myself onto set patterns ended up being
restrictive to me as a writer, stopping me from developing. I don't
think anyone can give you a 'write by numbers' text; after a certain
point, everyone needs to find their own path. (Yes, I think I just
told you to ignore everything written above. That's what I mean by
discovery writing – you never know where you are going to end up!)
Richard
got his start as a writer in the role-playing industry, running a
series of magazines and fanzines around the turn of the century
before the cold, bitter light of reality crept in, and he was forced
to find a ‘real job’ working as a media monitor; nevertheless,
the bug never actually stopped, and finally he decided to take a year
out and see what he could do with it. As a result, he is currently
the author of the ‘Battlecruiser Alamo’ series of books,
available on the Kindle.For more on Richard and his writing, check out his blog HERE.
